Dev1 Galaxy Forum / Search ranking on Distowatch

Re: Search ranking on Distowatch

dummy@example.com (zapper) — Tue, 19 Sep 2023 16:40:20 +0000

Distrowatch has a listing of categories of distros and it lists most of the distros.

The reviews and rankings are pretty darn useless but it does have a list of info at least.

Re: Search ranking on Distowatch

dummy@example.com (Camtaf) — Tue, 19 Sep 2023 08:49:51 +0000

These rankings are mainly newbies trying out various distros, most actual users already know which distro, & go direct to the website!

Re: Search ranking on Distowatch

dummy@example.com (boughtonp) — Mon, 18 Sep 2023 17:17:08 +0000

DistroWatch also provides the ability to review and rank a distro and reports the averages of the ratings.

In that ranking, when limited to distros with over 100 reviews, six of the top ten are non-systemd distros:

1 Void
2 Devuan
3 Artix
4 Arch
5 TrueNAS
6 Slackware
7 Debian
8 Mint
9 openSUSE
10 Q4OS

Although, since ~75% of them have a "Most Frequent Rating" of either 10 or 1, they're clearly not objective/reliable ratings... *shrug*

Re: Search ranking on Distowatch

dummy@example.com (boughtonp) — Mon, 18 Sep 2023 14:48:45 +0000

DistroWatch is working exactly as it should/describes:

https://distrowatch.com/search.php?defaultinit=Not+systemd wrote:

The following distributions match your criteria (sorted by popularity):

https://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=popularity wrote:

They simply show the number of times a distribution page on DistroWatch was accessed each day, nothing more.

So it isn't necessarily a meaningful stat, but at the same time it probably encourages people to go for distros higher in the list.

The correct conclusion is not that the search results are wrong, but that Devuan does not have enough people interested in it.

A bigger problem may be the general lack of popularity of any non-systemd distros - because, given MX Linux supports sysvinit or systemd, there are actually none in the top 10...

Search ranking on Distowatch

dummy@example.com (trinidad) — Mon, 18 Sep 2023 14:09:11 +0000

If you search for a non-systemd Linux OS on distrowatch MX Linux is at the top of the list and several others are listed before Devuan. Seems out of whack to me. Devuan should at least be first or second.